In a medical image acquisition system such as a computer tomography (CT) system or nuclear magnetic resonance tomography (MR) system, the image quality of the generated image data must be examined immediately after its acquisition in order to repeat the acquisition if necessary. As illustrated in FIG. 1, an image acquisition system 12 acquires an image from an acquisition device 13 and a first image pre-processing 14 (such as a change of the image brightness or of the image contrast) simultaneously occurs directly on the acquisition apparatus 12 (modality). The acquired and prepared images 24, 24′ are subsequently sent to a Picture Archival and Communications System (PACS) 20 and stored 22. The processing of the image acquisition and image distribution can often take several minutes.
From this point in time, further processing and appraisal of the acquired images ensues in predefined work steps that are established and monitored by a machine (workflow engine). These work steps are implemented on specially-equipped finding/image processing workstations 30 by different persons (such as radiologists) specially trained for the appraisal of medical images. The finding and image processing workstation 30 is generally one and the same, although in rare situations these may be separate (e.g., expensive 3D preprocessing hardware is available for only a few systems).
Due to the spatial, personal and temporal separation of the image acquisition and first pre-processing 12, 14 on the modality, and the finding inspection at the finding/image processing workstation 30, the pre-processing 14 on the modality requires particularly qualified personnel in order to ensure a qualified post-processing and finding description. A direct quality control and/or pre-processing of the image acquisition by the qualified radiologist on the finding workstation is not possible with present systems.
Due to the spatial separation of the image acquisition system 12 from the finding/image processing system 30 for the pre-processing of the images, the same image processing tools may not be available for the pre-processing 14 as are available on the finding workstations 30, or, if the same tools of the finding system 30 are separately provided for on the image acquisition system 12, there are additional costs.
This problem was previously solved by specially-trained personnel at the image acquisition apparatuses 12. These personnel had to ensure that the acquired images 24, 24′ possessed a quality sufficient for the finding generation. In the event that this quality was not present, a complete repetition of the acquisition procedure would have to ensue again.